


No Escape From Reality

by MollyC



Series: The Measure of a Fandom [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, In which I Tuckerize my entire flist, Leaning on the Fourth Wall, Meta, POV Outsider, Spoilers through Season 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-23
Updated: 2013-04-23
Packaged: 2017-12-09 06:42:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/771211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MollyC/pseuds/MollyC
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Can you call it RPF when there are demons?</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Escape From Reality

From the LiveJournal of prentice_molly, August 2009

**Meta, RPF, and Why I'm Conflicted**

So hi guys. This is...not what I expected to be posting tonight.  I'm specifically tagging **Iknowaghost** , **trickfic** , and **princess_aurora** \--don't need to tag **misty-chan** , because she was on IM with me last night while I was busy freaking out.

Some of you probably know that my SPN collection was incomplete.  I was missing _Children Shouldn't Play..., The Usual Suspects, Houses of the Holy, Heart, Red Sky_..., and _Jus in Bello_.  Usually I'm a stickler for reading/watching things in order, but with SPN I couldn't help myself, plus by the time I got into the fandom a bunch of the earlier books were getting hard to find.  I had all of the first arc (through John's death) because of a lucky find at a used book store; the second arc, however, was harder to track down, and someone bought the single copies of _RSaM_ and _JIB_ out from under me at the comic shop.

Thus you can imagine the squee two weeks ago when I opened an unexpected box that showed up just in time for my birthday and all my missing books were inside, courtesy of a RL friend with too much money and very good book-search skills.  Now, these days I am a Responsible Adult (tm), so I wasn't blowing through them the way I would have when I was in college, but two nights ago I started _JIB_.  I was really looking forward to it, because I liked the Henriksen arc and I knew _JIB_ was his send-off.

This is where we have a digression.

I come from a big family.  Really big.  We're-all-Irish-and-Italian-Catholics big.  (Well, OK, I am not a Catholic, no thanks to the best efforts of my parents when I was too young to protest, but you know what I mean.)  I have a whole lot of cousins I'm not very close to.  One of them was named Nancy.

I say "was named" because she died, eighteen months ago, when the police station where she worked as a secretary blew up.  Gas leak, apparently.  But wait, you say--wasn't Nancy the name of the secretary in  _Jus in Bello_?  Didn't  _she_ die, when Lilith came after Sam and Dean and destroyed the station?

Why yes.  Yes it was, and yes she did.

When I got to the part where the secretary's name was Nancy Fitzgerald, I thought, "Wow, what a funny coincidence."  When I read the physical description of her and compared it to the women on that side of the family, I did something of a Simple Dog Head Tilt.  But then at the end, when the station blew...well, that was just a bit much, and so I did some poking around.

What I found was, frankly, creepy.  The people who die, the bit parts, the teaser victims, they don't always get anything more than a first name; it's not always clear, even, what town the boys are heroically saving from evil in this volume.  But whenever it was possible to track down names and places...they are  _always real_.  If you're curious, you can read the list of references after the cut at the bottom, but I'll just hit some high points:

  * Stanford senior Jessica Moore died in a fire in her off-campus apartment just before midnight on November 2nd, 2005.  She had a live-in boyfriend, who refused to talk to reporters.
  * The plane crashes in  _Phantom Traveller_ were real, even the dates and times.
  * Several young women were killed in Saint Louis by a serial killer who apparently gained access to their homes by impersonating their husbands and boyfriends.  A man named Zachary Warren was initially suspected in the death of his fiancee, but was cleared when the real killer was shot by a SWAT team.
  * A family in Minnesota was discovered to have been kidnapping and killing people for literally decades. The father and one brother are dead; the second brother's in prison and the youngest child, a girl named Melissa, is in foster care.
  * A guy called Andy Gallagher disappeared from Guthrie, Oklahoma in early 2007.
  * There was a rash of strange deaths and vicious "pranks" on the campus of Springfield University (Ohio) in the spring of 2007.
  * There's a picture from the Biggerson's "Dinner For A Year" contest from a restaurant in New York (state), showing two handsome men--one tall, and one very tall--holding a huge mock gift certificate.  (I am not reopening the casting debate, but I have to admit the guy on the right looks more like the description of Dean than my own personal choice, Misha Collins, otherwise known as Avon from the  _Blake's 7_ reboot.  OK, maybe I am reopening the casting debate.)
  * A middle-aged couple called Madge and Edward Carrigan were discovered dead in their home on Christmas Day, 2007, having been stabbed with branches from their own tree.
  * Jeremy Frost, a resident of my very own Pittsburgh PA, died in his sleep in early 2008.
  * You all know the Ghostfacers website actually exists, right?



But you wanna know the kicker?  The one that really makes me wonder what the ever-loving fuck Carver Edlund thinks he's playing at?

Archives for small newspapers aren't always online, even in this day and age, but in the case of Lawrence Kansas I got lucky.  Let me quote the relevant sentence:

_John Winchester and his sons Dean, 4, and Sam, 6 months, escaped the blaze, but firemen were unable to rescue Mary Winchester._

Dateline: 3 Nov 1983.  I think we know Sam and Dean's last name now.

You may or may not know that I have a Thing about RPF--it really bugs me for some reason.  I don't think I look down on people who like it or write it, but it's not something I can do myself.  Write all the Sarah/Allison or Nathan/Adam you want; I will be over here.  And I've just discovered that my fandom, the fandom that took me away from the Dresden Files and  _Firefly_ both, is basically RPF with monsters.  And I do not know how to handle that.  I'm not sure if I would be quite this upset if it weren't for the personal connection--I didn't spend a lot of time with Nancy or anything, but we did share some small number of genes, you know?  I have, as they say, a dog in the fight.

So...that's where I'm at.  If you're interested, all the links I could find that seem to relate to the real-world counterparts of things in the books are under the cut.   I'm not planning to drop out of fandom--if nothing else, I can always go back to DF and  _Firefly_ ; I've even been known to write for _Buffy_ and various Marvel titles in my day _._  I'm leaving all my SPN fic up for now, and if I decide to take it down I'll give advance notice.  But I need to think about things.  I haven't bought my ticket to the con yet, and at this point I don't know if I'm going to, no matter how nice it'd be to finally meet some of you in person. And I've got a couple of challenge WIPs, including a Big Bang, that I'm now kind of side-eyeing and argh.

I wish there were some good way to get in touch with Edlund, but I don't think he needs a fangirl demanding to know what he thinks he's doing.  And I mean, this is all about ethics and where certain lines get drawn, and my lines aren't the same as anyone else's, necessarily.  

Just...read it for yourself, I guess, and tell me what you think.  Comments are staying on, but I'm logging IPs and trolling is not going to be tolerated.

**(Let's see how far down this rabbit hole goes)**

_mood:_ There's no icon for seriously, seriously messed up, is there?  
 _location:_ In the windmills of my mind  
 _music:_ Look, I liked mullet rock before the books, OK?


End file.
